Articles

Articles!

This page contains some articles about Eddie which have come from newspapers and magazines.

The Sunday Times Magazine - January 28, 2001

Not Just A Pretty Face.

Whether it’s the art of comedy, cross-dressing or the creation of the cosmos, Eddie Izzard put serious thought into it.

There is,” Sir Peter Hall says about Eddie Izzard, “a sweetness about him” It is a sweetness founded on earnestness. Izzard, the greatest British stand-up comedian and most admired transvestite of his generation, want to be - and is- loved, but he also wants the world to be a better, more loving place. “I don’t hate,” he says. “I don’t carry a huge amount of hatred.”

He is a super-liberal, promoting tolerance and understanding at every opportunity; an obsessive Europhile who is convinced that, if Europe can get its act together after so many blood-soaked centuries, then one day the whole world can unite under a single government. He’s even considered abandoning show business to become a social-democratic, radical liberal MEP. “Europe is fascinating and f****d up, and it’s a challenge. It’s where the cutting edge of politics is. But I don’t know, it’s probably better for me to stay out and keep doing gigs all over Europe,” he says.

So where better to talk to him than Berlin? Here the almost entirely modern buildings of the city centre proclaim the all-too-recent devastation of war, and here the spectre of the cold-war wall endures in the sudden transition between the colourful, rich West and the still grey, impoverished East. To him it is a symbolic home, a place where all paradoxes can be resolved, a place that, in 1989, discovered that in one bound it could be free. “I came here in January 1990. I wanted to see it. I got a map from East Berlin in which the West was just blank. I was very moved by the whole thing of the wall coming down and the joy of people just joining up. It was great.”

Eddie Izzard is 38 and finally, deservedly, on top of the world. He has cracked the Untied States - last year he won two Emmys for his video Dress to Kill - and after a long apprenticeship, he is successfully breaking into film. He is here to film The Cat’s Meow, a Peter Bogdanovich movie about a mysterious boat trip taken by William Randolph Hearst and friends in 1924. Izzard is Charlie Chaplin, who fancied Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress, and who as a result, was almost shot by the press baron. He will also be seen in Shadow of the Vampire, about the making of Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu, and based on the idea that its star was, indeed, a vampire. Izzard plays the rather bewildered, non-bloodsucking male lead opposite Willem Dafoe’s vampire and John Malkovich’s Murnau.

Much ink has been split and many trees felled on the subject of Eddie Izzard, He is on oddity, an extravagantly ordinary, amiable exotic whose accessibility is overlaid by mystery, whose amiability is subverted by paradox. Long, very boring psychobabble attempts have been made to get at the roots of his transvestism; equally long, boring attempts have been made to explain exactly why his jokeless, rambling monologues are so funny. People want to know him and he wants to be known - it is part of his politics of tolerance and understanding - and yet he remains elusive.

So, one more time, what is it about him? What is going on behind those earnest blue-grey eyes? Well, for a start, he’s a planner. “The plan goes on for ever,” he says, “but it’s looses and changes constantly.” It is simple enough: he will do stand-up comedy and act until he drops dead. Maybe the odd bit of theatre - he’s just played Lenny Bruce in London’s West End - and the occasional chat show. But big distractions are out. After the Emmys he was offered 22 episodes of the American sitcom Third Rock from the Sun. Despite the money involved and his admiration for its star, John Lithgow, he refused: “I think it would have locked me too much into that kind of thing.” He has always treated television with extreme caution. Struggling though his lean years of stand-up and street comedy in the 1980’s, he wanted nothing more than his own sketch-based show. But when he made it in the 1990s, he avoided the medium. This was not because of the usual comedian’s fear of using up too much material - Izzard’s material, being life as a whole, is infinite - but because he feared the “baggage”. He knew he wanted to be in films, but he didn’t want to be seen as the funny man breaking into acting so that each time he appeared people would expect him to do a comic routine. There was a chat show, a spell on Have I Got News For You, but he never became that TV on TV.

One can speculate endlessly about this planning bug. His father, retired with his second wife in Bexhill, may have been one source. He was once stationed in Yemen, which is where Eddie was born. Called John at home and Harold at work, Izzard Sr seems to have been a model of hard work, organisation and domestic eccentricity. The giant mower he attempted to tame when the family lived in Northern Ireland remains a much-loved part of his son’s act. “We’re very similar. We’re both stubborn, cantankerous bastards with strongly held opinions and a lot of stamina. He gave me the confidence to be able to take it further - he went from zero financial background all the way up through BP.”

Izzard’s planning also has something to do with his transvestism. He was drawn to women’s clothes from the age of three, but he did not tell his father - who, typically, took it extraordinarily well - until he was 29. It is not a casual habit. His glamour gear is studied and tasteful, requiring, as women always point out, immense care. In Berlin he is wearing black Levi’s, a tight T-shirt and a woman’s leather jacket. He is just as likely to appear in full make-up, heels and even a miniskirt. And even in relatively masculine gear, he often checks himself in mirrors and refuses the offer of a scarf against the bitingly cold wind that lashes him, myself and the photographer on the fairground Ferris wheel. It would have spoilt the look. The planning extends to every aspect of the image.

And this level of planning requires a certain inner coldness to the contingencies of the world. This, I am sure, springs from the death of his mother from cancer when he was six. He admits he closed down emotionally after that. The event was also probably instrumental in his decision to break away from the days and went to study accountancy and financial management with mathematics at Sheffield university: “It was the longest course name I could find. I thought it would look impressive.” But he dropped out after a year. “My dad said at one point that a daughter if a friend was 23, she had a company car and good wages. ‘Don’t you regret not having that?’ he said. Well, absolutely not.”

He’s also an autodidact. Izzard has mild dyslexia, which makes reading hard. “It meant that at school I had no respect for literature. I found it confusing and difficult to read. I was into all this empirical stuff: maths, physics and chemistry. I liked exactitude, two plus two equals four. Not for me: it sorts of equals nine.”

Still, even without reading, he has an awesome ability to absorb. In the US he was called “a human search engine” because of the way his stand-up routines seem to draw on a private internet of associations. Did Hannibal’s elephants ski to get over the Alps? How did a dog food get to be called Cesar? Why do Star Trek phasers just stun and kill rather than inducing mild depression or a sudden interest in botany? And so on. He gets all this from channel surfing in hotel rooms, browsing CD-Rom encyclopaedias and watching movies on DVD over and over again. When we meet in Berlin, he was obsessed with Gladiator.
But he is touching aware that books area problem. He talks about wanting to read all the philosophers, though he knows he probably can’t: “Maybe some kind of child’s guide would be best.” And he fiercely held cosmological theory that the universe is circular, which is why his last stand-up show was called Circle. But this auto didacticism is not just about knowledge; it is also about technique. Despite appearances, nothing comes easily. “I worked out enough to know that I don’t seem to be naturally good at anything except I naturally have an ability to learn things. I mean, I shouldn’t really be able to do stand-up. Around 1987 I would go out on Streatham Common and ad-lib into a tape recorder. I couldn’t write it down, I had to ad-lib it. I was just trying to be funny in the middle of the night on my own. If anything worked, I’d transcribe it. But then that didn’t work either. It was a year and a half between my first two stand-up gigs. But I knew I had to do it.”

His tenacity and courage are extraordinary. Having decided in his teens that he wanted to be, first, a comedian, then a film actor, he simply travelled to Edinburgh from Sheffield to do stand-up and street comedy at the festival. It wasn’t as easy as he thought, so he worked at it for more than a decade. Rehearsing, he says, is something he always does before paying audiences. “It was a total do-or-die approach. The ‘80’s were my test, really. They were seven bags of sh** for me, so the ‘90s were all about doing double time.”

He did, as he admits, “some really bad stuff”, suffered humiliation and loss of confidence, but always moved on. “I’m not afraid of failure. I’ve been to faliureland. It makes you embarrasses, you face goes red and no one wants to talk to you. I didn’t want to do these shows. But once you’ve dine that and come out of it, you learn to just keep looking forward. If you are learning anything new, you have got to get through humiliation.”

He’s still courting humiliation. Equipped with incompletely brushed-up schoolboy French, he has successfully performed stand-up in Paris. Now he’s working on his German and hopes to play Berlin. He’s slightly worried about the punch lines - verbs in German often come at the ends of sentences and he’s more accustomed to closing on nouns. Meanwhile, he’s struggling up another steep learning curve. “I haven’t done much good acting up until now. I’ve only just learnt how to hit my mark without looking at the floor.”

The lack of reading, however, is often painfully revealed. He looks stunned when I try to explain Marxism: its mad utopian extremism is utterly new to him. And recently, this supreme Europhile told a friend that Brussels should adopt Beethoven’s Ode to Joy as the European national anthem. It was gently explaining to him that they already had.

Which brings me to a third element: he is an innocent. On stage, in spite of the make-up and extravagantly lush clothes, he appears as a wondering child or a half-awake adult asking stupid questions of the world that, on closer inspection, turn out to be possessed of their own crazed but lucid logic. What would a bird do if it found itself on a plane? Why do pears stay hard for day, then ripen to inedible mush in seconds? And, again in Star Trek, what was Spock starring at down that strange binocular tube thingy? A Twix, of course.

This sage innocence is the pose, it is the result of hard work - it is simply what makes people laugh. But at another level, it is also the reality. For he really is a dreamer. He seems much of the time to be stuck in that state between sleeping and waking in which surreal connections form and then dissolve, utterly logical one moment, inexplicable the next. When fully awake and not on stage, the innocence persists in the form of his fervent political idealism, fired by his CD-Rom education. “I think Europe can come together. It’s going to be really hard. America has a sense of it - if you go back to 1774 it was just a loose confederation of states. But it didn’t work, the states were too strong and we’ve just had this thing about Florida going on about states’ rights. It’s going to be harder here because we have different languages and people aren’t going to want to throw away their language. But it’s also going to be easier because we’ve been around for a long time. We probably won’t have a civil was because we’ve done that so many times. We’ve all done this fighting thing and people can look around and read about that. We’ve got to do it because, if we don’t, somebody is just going to get a nuclear bomb and drop it on somebody.”

His politics is based on the simple conviction that people should stop doing horrible things to each other. One recent routine of his involved the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, rewritten to feature Pap Doc Duvalier, Mama Doc and Baby Doc. When it turns out that it is Idi Amin who has eaten Baby Doc’s porridge, the Duvaliers skin him. The intrusion of monstrous brutality into a children’s story if pure Izzard. It shows what a bizarrely - and comically - wrong thing evil is. He compares the effect to the film Pulp Fiction, in which the killers discuss hamburgers prior to slaughtering their victims. There is innocence too in his frank transvestism. “It’s just my sexuality,” he says, “it doesn’t seems to be going anywhere. I’m sure it’s genetic.”

Once he decided he like to wear women’s clothes, he simply wore them. This led to him being beaten up in Cambridge - he won the subsequent court case. He cunningly describes himself as an action or executive transvestite, at which point, he claims, people just say: “Oh, that’s all right, then.” In this and in every other area, he believes in talking. He wants to normalise transvestism, to make it boring, so that people will be free to act and dress as they like.

In the film All The Queen’s Men, he actually plays a transvestite. Strolling around in a dress in between takes, he defuses the suspicion of some Hungarian extras who were playing Nazi soldiers by simply saying hello in Hungarian. “It’s talking that makes you human. They see I drink tea and coffee just like them.”

His innocence constantly prompts him to ask: “Why shouldn’t people just get along?” It is an attitude that can make him a frustrating interviewee. He is almost pathologically averse to passing judgement on anyone or anything.
“Could you lie in Hollywood?”
“No, I love Europe too much.”
“More that America?”
“No, I love them both in different ways.”

Sometimes he seems tolerant to the point of inertia. He even denies the Englishness of his whimsical style - it seems obvious to me and to almost everyone who has ever reviewed an Izzard show. But Izzard won’t have it. He doesn’t want to be one thing, he wants to be all things. And he flares with mild outrage at the suggestion that the Germans don’t have a sense of humour. The slightest ascription of national character seems to offend his sense that, basically people are all the same. “When I worked in Paris, I made them laugh in a second language. Why not? They are human beings. They have supermarkets and kids. They want to get a car that works. They don’t like oranges, but they do like apples. With this thing of globalisation and everyone linking up in the internet, it’s the right time. The third millennium is the right time. Just by talking to people, it brings everyone closer.”

He even has an innocent belief in technology. He says what Europe needs is third-generation mobile phones that automatically translate all European languages. The world can and must get better, and Eddie Izzard will lead the way.

The fourth thing about him is that in spite of all that, he is tough. This may already be obvious from the way he has survived the trials of his career, but there is more to it than that. He is hard to grasp because he appears to be open about everything, but, in some strange was, he is not fully engaged with his own openness. He holds back. For example, there is his mysterious female partner and his brother, both whom, he says, have asked never to be mentioned, so he never does. But one can’t help feeling that, especially in the case of the partner, this is Izzard’s decision. He wasn’t, beneath the make-up, to keep a private face, but he cannot quite admit this because it subverts his creed of plain-speaking.

The obsession with image is also a way of concealing the self. He sees himself as on display all the time and, therefore, in some way not fully present - models’ eyes, for example, are always professionally blank. Currently, he claims to have given up eating and he runs in an attempt to keep as a close as possible to the slim, sharp feminine shape he so desires but which his genes - he is somewhat barrel-chested and lantern-jawed - perversely deny him.

So Izzard teeters between frank exposure and tough concealment. You seem to be getting everything, but you know you aren’t. Between him and talking and him posing for a photograph, there is a gulf a mile wide. Significantly, he relaxes when we agree he will not be photographed while he is being interviewed; he cannot use both sides of himself at once.

He is one of life’s great fascinators. But more importantly, he is wonderful, benign comedian and, one day soon, he will be a fine film actor. What you see on a stand-up roll, you know you and he are in a much better place, a childhood place where mothers don’t die and transvestites walk the streets unmolested. “You’re like a child who want attention,” he says of stand-up, “then suddenly all the attention in the world is on you and you have to do something, so you go off into this weird world. It’s like being a kid again.”

The sweetness and earnestness become one in the blue-grey gaze of a child who want to but can’t understand.

The Daily Express- Tuesday April 17, 2001

I’m just a male lesbian who’s made a career out of talking a load of rubbish.

Eddie Izzard’s brand of left-field whimsy and his droll, amicable personality shining out from everything that he does have made him an undisputed national favourite. His comedy treads surreal and delightful paths - creating worlds in which crafty pets prospect for oil behind living room sofas - but it never strays into malice or cheap crudity.

The easy charm of the 39-year old has won over people who might, with another public figure, have been uncomfortable with his penchant for wearing make-up.

It is this winning mixture of determination and levity which hi is bringing to bear on what he sees as a deeply important responsibility, hosting and organising the sequel to the most famous fundraising comedy events of the past three decades, The Secret Policeman’s Ball.

The responsibility he feels lies not in the event per se - although for comedy fans it will have a great deal to live up to - but for the cause that it champions, the human rights charity Amnesty International. A spectacular one-night festival of stand-up comedy and music at Wembley Arena on June 3, it marks the 40th anniversary of the crusading organisation.

Although laughter and earnestness can be uncomfortable bedfellows - take the disconcerting and sobering pictures of the poverty stricken children that are often interspersed into the annual Comic Relief nights on the BBC - Izzard believes profoundly in the event.

“John Cleese recommended me to do it, fool that he is,” he says. “He did it originally, so it’s a handing on of the baton. It’s a big undertaking, but I’ve played Wembley before and so it should be a wild, crazy, hectic night. Comedy in this situation is to raise money and raise awareness.
“This is human politics. I deal with them more and more in my stand up.
“I talk a lot of garbage of course and I don’t deal with party politics. I’m not so interested in that because it soon disappears.
“Comedy has a certain amount of force, but I don’t know how much it actually changes things. People get entertained by it, that’s the first thing, so with people coming to Wembley it will raise money and we can sell the television rights around the world,” he explains.

The line-up for the concert, titled We Know Where You Live, is being kept a closely guarded secret although “huge” names from here and the United States are being promised. The original concerts in 1979 and 1982, which were recorded and released as two films, featured Peter Cook, Billy Connolly, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Victoria Wood, Alan Bennett and Rowan Atkinson and are seen as snap shots of the best comedy of the period.

Although the first two concerts features several famous sketches and skits, Izzard says that the emphasis this time will be slightly different, mainly because the original Balls were filmed in the more intimate surroundings of a theatre.

“I think it’s going to be more stand-up based,” he says. “It’s kind of weird in Wembley because it feels more logical to do stand-up. I think you could do sketches - with a lot of cameras and huge screens it might be possible. Still, it will probably be mainly stand-up. You lose on intimacy, but you gain on event.”

The drive which Izzard is displaying in promoting the Amnesty concert is entirely characteristic, in his own way he has long been a campaigner but without ever displaying the slightly irritating political didacticism of someone like Ben Elton.

Izzard’s causes are the political movement towards a more integrated and mutually understanding Europe and what he calls the “transgender community”. He describes himself as a “male lesbian”, someone who feels at home as a women but who is sexually exclusively attracted to women. He has a girlfriend, but adamantly refuses to reveal her identity or discuss the relationship.

He was born in Yemen in 1962. His father John worked for petroleum firm BP as an accountant and his mother Dorothy was a midwife.
When Izzard was six, his mother died of cancer. Soon after this, he was sent to boarding school where, like so many other comics, his talent for laughter surfaced in the classroom. He says that he liked wearing frocks from the age of four, but kept that fact to himself. At 15, he was caught stealing lipstick but lied and said it was for a girl. At 30, he performed his first comedy gig in a dress.

“It wasn’t a drama at all”, he says. “The way I do it is to go on to talk a lot of garbage. My career is talking rubbish, or doing films and being creative, and I just happen to be transgender. It’s a lot more cool and groovy now. You separate sexuality and what you do for a living.

It’s not just with this personal issue that Izzard practises what he preaches. As an ardent believer in closer ties between us and our European neighbours, he has taken a brave step of performing comedy gigs in as many countries as he can - and in their native languages irrespective of whether he can already speak them or not.

“I want to do a gig in Germany, in German, by the end of 2002, that’s my next plan,” says Izzard, who has donated £10,000 to the Labour Party.
“Spain, Italy, Russia, Japan. I just keep mentioning it so people say, ‘Hey you said you were going to do this’ and then you can’t get away from it. I’m a tenacious b*****d and if I get it in my head to go and do something, I’ll keep battering away.
“The early French gigs I did were quite awful, they were not entertaining, they were just me stammering and having a bad time. By the end of the last ones I did, two weeks of playing Paris, I was quite entertaining, a decent gig. My French is like a 14-year-old trying to do stand-up. I can ask for a helicopter with jam on I, so it sounds a bit off, but the only way you can get on is to keep pushing at it.
“The thing is, I have this relentless, dogged approach for things and it seems the only way of doing it. I’m into the idea of a melting pot in Europe and Britain should be part of it. We’ve never adjusted to the loss of the Empire, but we need to think on a big scale again as part of a bigger entity. So if we just talk to each other, get a bit more trust going on, we will get somewhere.”

Izzard, who divides his time between home in London’s Notting Hill and a pad in Los Angeles, and who says he is unashamedly ambitious, is also increasingly turning his concentration to films. His celluloid career so far has been bumpy. He has acquitted himself well into some not very good films, such as the Avengers movie with Ralph Fiennes, but he is showing characteristic grit.

“Film is something I’ve always wanted to do,” he says. “I’ve always been a movie nut, so almost everything I’ve done has been to try to get into films even though I loved doing comedy. But I don’t think I’ve done really good work up to now. That’s OK because I have to learn the technique and I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

However, the parts are still being offered. “I’ve just played Charlie Chaplin in a film called The Cat’s Meow. Peter Bogdanovich directed that,” he says. “I think that’s going to be good. The vibe on it’s good. It’s about William Randolf Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies. In 1924, they did a boat trip party. Charlie Chaplin was on board, Louella Parsons the American gossip columnist was on board and someone got shot on the yacht and it was all covered up.

“I play Chaplin aged about 35 and at that time just about the most famous person in the world. It’s not about the public Chaplin, it’s about the private Chaplin chasing after Marion Davies. It will be interesting to see what people think. “There is another film as well called All The Queen’s Men which is about four soldiers going into Germany to pick up yet another Enigma machine, but they have to dress up as women.
“It’s a bit like Some Like It Hot meets The Great Escape and its got the Second World War as a kind of backdrop. It’s all about sex and sexuality and women working in men’s jobs and men dressing up as women and it has a comedy element.”
Given Izzard’s own background, it seems at last Hollywood has come up with a part tailor-made for him.